Question: What are some famous scientists in the field you guys work in?

Keywords: , ,

  1. The most famous in my direct area is Sir Alec Jeffreys who was the first scientist to show DNA can be used for identification. Some other really notable forensic scientists are Edmond Locard who formulated one of the basic principles of forensic science – “Every contact leaves a trace”; Henry Lee a blood pattern expert who became famous after serving as an expert witness in the OJ Simpson case, William (Bill) Bass a forensic anthropologist who advanced techniques to identify people from bones and also set up the “Body Farm” at the University of Tennessee and of course, Kathy Reichs, also a forensic anthropologist whose life and novels were the inspiration for the TV Show “Bones”.

    I also work with ancient DNA researchers, and the most famous of those is probably Svante Paabo. He was not only a pioneer in showing you can recover DNA from very old remains (eg. bones that are thousands of years old) but he also was the leader of the team who recently sequenced the full DNA sequence (genome) of a Neanderthal. This is a very big accomplishment considering Neanderthals have been extinct for about 30,000 years, so the DNA is that remains in their bones is really degraded.

    0

  2. Here is a list of some great computer scientists http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/greatnames.html and another list of famous women in computer science http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/admissions/what_is_cs/FamousWomen.html

    I even know some of them!!!

    Gerry Sussman is one of the inventors of the Scheme programming language (a descendant of Lisp). My PhD supervisor was Ken Forbus who was a student of Gerry Sussman!

    Stephen Wozniak designed the first Apple computer. Everybody knows about Steve Jobs, but Stephen Wozniak equally contributed to the design of Apple computer

    🙂

    0

Comments